


Storm-Warning

by Kyra_Neko_Rei



Series: In Which I Mistake Inktober For A Writing Challenge [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Childhood Memories, Force-enhanced interrogation, Gen, Interrogation, Invasive Telepathy, Storms, mindscape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2019-01-08 01:00:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12244050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyra_Neko_Rei/pseuds/Kyra_Neko_Rei
Summary: Inktober 2017: Father and Daughter, The Wicked Cyborg, Witch-Weather.Darth Vader's interrogation of Leia Organa on the Death Star is enhanced by the use of the Force; Leia retreats into a childhood memory. Vader follows.





	Storm-Warning

**Author's Note:**

> Inktober is here and I’m making at least a short-lived attempt at it and mangling the rules slightly by gobbling up multiple prompts, some official, some of my own devising from what I encounter elsewhere.
> 
> Star Wars, October 1 prompts: Father and Daughter, The Wicked Cyborg, Witch-Weather.

The world is pain, confusion, and a frantic need to keep something hidden. Leia Organa is the one in pain, and the one confused, and she has no idea what manner of thing she’s hiding or even, at the moment, where she’s put it. She has enough awareness to know that this is a blessing, and it’s enough for her to turn and face her pursuer, defiance that is half performance and yet all, entirely, real.

 

Vader is behind her, monster, persecutor, nightmare made flesh though she doesn’t know the half of it, this cursed and blessed time when he has not yet stood idly by as Tarkin gives his unthinkable order, has not yet held her captive and forced her to watch as her homeworld is blasted to cinders; here, he is only her torturer, her interrogator, searching for what she’s done with the where is the location of the who are her fellow traitors in the  _no no no_  don’t think it! Thoughts are betrayal now, here, this place with her body pumped full of drugs and her mind full of  _him_.

 

The place they are is a beach of mid-brown sand shading into shallow waters and low sandbars and from there to an ocean with clouds on the horizon. It is Alderaan, and it is a memory from her childhood. Her father brought her here, once, she was eight and she was fascinated, had spent a day running through sand and low surf in a pretty green swimsuit, getting knocked over by waves and building sand palaces and climbing the trees that clung to the shoreline and asking her father why they had to be the royal family, couldn’t they just live here and play in the water every day?

 

She’s standing near the edge of the sandbar, the water flowing cold over her white boots and soaking into the hem of her gown, and Vader is paused on the shoreline and she wonders if he’d feel the cold if he gets his boots wet, but mostly she’s thinking of her father’s response, how he’d quietly told her that Alderaan needed them, that storms like the one building in the distance could happen with people as well as with water and air, and that queens like her mother and senators like himself were important, to face down the storms when needed and keep people free when others wanted them burdened or misused or killed.

 

Senators like her, she thinks. Queens like she’ll be after her mother. Princesses like she was then and is now today, her boots in the sand and the wind in her hair and she parries the subtle, Force-enriched suggestion from Vader that she think more about the Senate with the memory of her father’s hand on her shoulder as she looked up at the waving trees, out at the restless ocean, and here and now she turns away from Darth Vader and watches the oncoming storm. Enough of him; he is behind her. He can’t get here without getting his boots wet.

 

She feels his awareness of the thought, and some hint of amusement, and half-turns, sees him stride through the water to stand beside her, his cloak wet, his boots in water to the armored shins.

 

“This storm will be too much for you to weather, Your Highness,” he tells her, the deep voice echoed by thunder in the distance. “You should withdraw. Make it easier on yourself.” Underneath is the power of suggestion, give up, give in, give him a name, a strategy, a system, his presence tugging at the edges of hidden things like the wind that buffeted her nearly off her feet, back when she was a child and the only storms she knew boiled in her homeworld’s skies. The wind picks up here, too, the waves soaking her legs. Vader’s cloak is sodden and flapping behind him like a heavy flag, and Leia, on impulse, gives his persuasion the answer it deserves, scooping up a handful of wet sand and flinging it at him.

 

He stares at her, full surprised and spattered with sand, and she laughs at the surreality, at her childishness or her pettiness or some memory of childhood comfort, when she was young enough to use thrown objects as a rhetorical tactic and when she could run around an island playing with her father, who loved her, who would protect her, who wants her to remind him where the Rebel base is—

 

She screeches at the realization, at the invasion, at the horrifyingly real feeling of truth ringing behind  _your father wants you to tell me_ ; the wind pulls at her hair and the elaborate coiffure falls free and she has a cloak of her own rippling out behind her to match Vader’s, and she staggers with the wind and with the effort to twist free of the suggestion. A wave comes surging at the wrong moment and she falls unbalanced against Vader.

 

“No,” she snaps, meaning the compulsion to speak of the Rebels, pushing away at his chest and shoulder all the same, her hands so pale and small against the polished darkness. He lets her step away, regain her balance. The wind makes it difficult; behind her, the trees are waving, and her eyes find the one with the sharp double scar running from crown to roots. There is another mental nudge from Vader, one that goes father-senate-traitors-tell, but she focuses back on  _father_  and turns her mind to the trees, to the lightning in the distance, to the wind and the dazzling coldness of the rain and the explanation of why they must leave.

 

Storms leave scars, her father had said. Lightning had struck this tree, had burnt it, had sent its current along the outer bark and burned it away, years ago, and in all that time the tree had only made such little progress at healing. See the bare wood, centimeters wide, and see the twin bulges running alongside it, the tree growing, slowly, the means to cover the wound where it was blown open by power beyond its comprehension.

 

Trees heal, Leia had responded. Trees grow, even when you cut them, they would stubbornly continue, even if cut to the ground. While they live, they grow, defying all storms, all injuries.

 

Her father had smiled, the way that said he was proud of her. True, Leia, he had said. But storms could do damage, and sometimes, when there was nothing to be gained by enduring, one had to retreat from them, let them blow over. The trees, he had said, must endure this storm, because their life was being here. But they, she and her father, must leave, for there was nothing to be gained by their risking the lightning, and only a fool or someone with something to gain stood under tall trees when lightning was imminent. Lightning, when it struck, could do just as much damage to a person.

 

Leia had been sad to leave. She had wanted to stay, to watch the storm break, to stand in the wind and the waves, to wait with the trees. She had wanted the little island and the waves and her father’s presence, his colleagues in the senate, conspirators in the Rebellion, to just speak a name or two, and Leia reaches out and slaps Vader across the chest, over where his heart would be if he has one.

 

It’s useless and yet satisfying and it makes her hand sting and the rest of her feel better. She remembers that her father had stayed with her in the speeder as they retreated from the storm, and as the first raindrops hit her with little sharp bursts of cold and the hint of reaction from Vader, a slight off-balancing under the force of her strike, fills her with that same hint of petty glee, she imagines that she is eight again, and that her father is with her, and that this time, she will face down the storm.

 


End file.
